It as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas,… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share Image
You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated 'you' makes more decisions,… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share Image
“It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task which it is performing, and survey what it has done; it is always looking for, and often finding, patterns. Now I said that an intelligence canjump out of its task, but that does not mean that it always will. However, a little prompt- ing will… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share
Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share Image
For 13 to be unlucky would require there to be some kind of cosmic intelligence that counts things that humans count and that also… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share Image
The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share
No reference is truly direct—every reference depends on SOME kind of coding scheme. It's just a question of how implicit it is. — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share Image
You can never represent yourself totally … to seek self -knowledge is to embark on a journey which ... will always be incomplete, cannot… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share Image
The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity. — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share Image
It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of a task which it is performing and survey what it has… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share Image
Enormous numbers of people are taken in, or at least beguiled and fascinated, by what seems to me to be unbelievable hocum, and relatively… — Douglas Hofstadter Copy Share Image
